What Love Can Do: Recollected Stories of Slavery and Freedom in New Orleans and the Surrounding Area

Copyright © 2012 Gayle Nolan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-4624-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-4623-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012901050

Balboa Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1-(877) 407-4847

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Printed in the United States of America

Balboa Press rev. date: 2/20/2012

CONTENTS

Introduction

Editor’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Athur Mitchell

Introduction

This volume of stories written by Arthur Mitchell came to me through one of the students I taught in a freshman composition course at Delgado Community College in New Orleans. A non-traditional student, Teryl Mitchell had decided to enter college in her mid-thirties, after being out of high school for some years. Having had little or no preparation for college, Teryl struggled with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and as a result, had failed in her first attempt at English 101. Discouraged, she confided in my supervisor that she would have to drop out of college because she would never pass English. Instead, my supervisor suggested that Teryl enroll in my special section of English 101, where she would receive more direct attention.

With her first essay, I immediately recognized a natural writer in Teryl–someone who could make a story come alive, who could make the reader care about what she was saying. The mechanics were poor, but I told Teryl in our first conference that was something we could work on. I was more excited about her ability to write. Teryl told me that she had inherited her natural talent from her father, who wrote all the time. What does he write? I asked curiously. Oh, just stories, she said. Stories he remembers from his grandparents, aunts, and uncles, some of whom had been slaves before the Civil War. He always wants me to listen to his stories, but I tell him I don’t have time to listen. Now I was intrigued. I asked Teryl if her father would mind if I read the stories.

The next week, Teryl brought me a black loose-leaf binder with 150 carefully hand-written pages of clear script in black ink. In order to save paper, Arthur Mitchell had lined in between the given lines, so that each page contained about double the number of words he might have written on that page. Teryl told me that her father had worked for the Cabildo, part of the Louisiana State Museum System in New Orleans, for about 40 years. During his two 15-minute breaks each day, Arthur Mitchell would go to the 3rd floor attic of the museum, where he had a small table and chair. There he would write the stories he had heard as a young boy growing up in the French Quarter of New Orleans. According to his own account, in those days, children did not run the streets at night, but they sat around a coal or wood-burning stove and listened to the stories told by their elders.

Some of Mitchell’s immediate family had been born into slavery, or just after the Emancipation Proclamation, and their recollections illustrate the time of transition from the viewpoint of one family and small community in South Louisiana. Some of Mitchell’s ancestors could read and write, and they had hidden their written stories under the floorboards, still in fear of being discovered even after all the years since their lives in slavery.

That night, I carried home what I recognized to be a very precious document, and sat down to begin reading. What I encountered electrified me. Mitchell’s story began in the Lake Tanganyika region of Central Africa, detailing the customs and way of life of the people there. I was not aware of any other slave accounts that actually began in Africa, least of all in East Central Africa, describing the tribal way of life and describing an actual capture.

The narrative centers around the oldest son of one of the original captives, a beautiful young girl named Ablibobee, and her master, a French farmer named Artie (or Artee) Jons, whose plantation seems to have been located somewhere in the Tchoupitoulas region around New Orleans. Born of this union, Henry Goody Jons evidently so resembled his white father that he was offered the opportunity to pass for white and to inherit all that his father owned and could provide. Unwilling to deny his black mother and siblings, Henry Jons declined the offer and lived out his adult life as a pastor to the little black community that emerged following their release from slavery.

As I read, I was touched and amazed by the account of a captured and enslaved people who, having been previously taught and Christianized by British missionaries, struggled to live out the gospel message of love and forgiveness toward one’s enemies. From the original voyage account of slaves who saved the life of their captor to the stories of being sold into slavery, I found Mitchell’s slave stories unlike anything I had previously read. For example, these slaves, having been previously educated by British missionaries, could read and write English and do basic mathematics. These slaves were advertised all over the South at a time when few French farmers could boast of the same skills and when women running plantations on their own had need of slaves who could read and write.

Mitchell notes in his manuscript that slave-owners in New Orleans, especially, would not buy light-skinned slaves (presumably those from the Western Coast of Africa) because dark-skinned captives, once they had accepted the fact that they were slaves, were immensely loyal to and protective of their owners, although they had every opportunity they needed to poison or to kill those who owned them. People in New Orleans depended on their house slaves to shop, cook, care for their children, and manage their households. What emerges here and there in Mitchell’s account is the often very close relationship that existed between the slave-owners and the slaves, especially in the city and surrounding areas. In the more outlying areas (called parishes in Louisiana), those relationships did not exist, as evidenced by the hatred and fear of blacks that characterized the period immediately following the Civil War.

During that time, Pastor Johns had to deal with the bickering and divisions within the Black community, as well as the destructive forces from the white community. He took on himself the burdens of both groups, making it his mission in life to show what love could do. His mantra was, I love people—all people.

In these pages, we find cameos of a 19th-century way of life that changed dramatically from slavery to freedom following the Emancipation Proclamation. We find a frightened and sometimes bigoted white population unsure of what the future would bring, and a Black community led by Pastor Johns, who continually taught them to love one another as well as to love those who did not love them. He himself was their example–extending his hand in welcome to all he met, regardless of race, color, or status. He taught little children to be kind to one another and he taught the Black community to forgive those who had enslaved and mistreated them. More than just words or sermons, he daily lived out his message of love and forgiveness. Toward the end of his life, he stepped between an enraged white sheriff and an innocent young Black man, saying When you have finished listening to me, you can begin shooting.

His death brought together for the first time the entire community, white and Black. It was said of him then that he wore love like a garment, incarnating in his own life the Christian message and thereby changing an entire community, down to the present generation.

The message passed on to Arthur Mitchell and to his cousins and siblings was more than a collection of slave stories; it was a clear message that hatred and resentment was a more powerful bondage than that of slavery itself. The stories preserve not so much the experience of a people in slavery, but rather of a people who preserved their core values and vision of life while in slavery, by holding onto the principles of love taught to them by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Editor’s Note

Very much the story-teller, Mitchell’s descriptions are precise and illuminative, often capturing the original raconteur’s nodding of the head or exuberance in relating the point. Although the story begins in the third person, with a narrator (Mitchell himself), it often slips into a first-person account, clearly repeating words he had heard directly from the source. Rarely does he indicate direct quotation or even seem to notice the transition from his own voice to that of another. Typical of an oral culture where story-telling recurs in relatively small segments, repeats, and double-backs upon itself, Arthur Mitchell’s stories at first seem somewhat disconnected and disjointed, even confusing at times. However, I soon discovered that, also characteristic of an oral culture, each time the story recurs, another dimension or connection becomes apparent. It is possible that writing in 15-minute segments, Mitchell may have retold sections already written. However, the story which begins with a general and somewhat confusing overview becomes more clear and connected with each re-telling.

My first approach to the stories was to try to separate the threads and to make a logical narrative of them. Each time I tried, however, I found that I had destroyed the wonderful storytelling characteristic of the account. The more I struggled to make connect the threads of the story, the more hopeless the task seemed to grow. Finally, I shelved the document in light of my teaching and administrative duties, but I could not forget it.

After I had retired from my work at the Community College, and had re-built the house destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, I decided to retrieve the slave narratives from my files — on January 15, 2008. As I read through the narrative once again, I saw it with fresh eyes and wondered whether its value as written, without extensive editing, might be even greater than a logical, linear, tale. This time, I decided to record the narrative as Arthur Mitchell wrote it, changing spelling only when it seemed absolutely necessary for comprehension. Mitchell, a writer who occasionally looked up words he had misspelled, characteristically reverses letters in certain words (su for us, for example, and ture instead of true). As I considered these reversals—and sometimes wrong spellings–part of the charm of the narrative, and as I considered them not too distracting for the reader, I decided at first to leave them in place. Later, however, I considered that the general reader might consider the document un-edited, and so changed my mind, even while preserving my original, un-edited document for the future.

Although Mitchell completed only the fourth grade, I found his punctuation amazingly sophisticated in many places, and I reproduced it as faithfully as possible. There are places in the manuscript where it is difficult to tell whether a period or a comma was intended; in those places, I simply made a choice in favor of correctness. Many times, sentences collide with one another, as though the writer was attempting to complete a thought without realizing how it began. In those cases, for the sake of the reader, I have inserted periods between sentences. At first, I did so without capitalizing the second sentence in order to preserve Mitchell’s narrative as much as possible. In preparing the book for publication, however, I soon realized that what I believed to be charming, and preserving the original document as closely as possible would appear to the reader as carelessness.

My struggle was not to over-correct Mitchell’s story so that it sounded more like the editor than the story-teller. In many places, I have chosen to allow expressions to remain because of their flavor rather than because of their correctness. Mitchell will most often string several (or more) sentences together, separated only by and, thus capturing the wonderful sound of a real story. I have chosen to preserve that style throughout the book. Wherever I have felt it necessary to insert words into the manuscript for readability, I have included them in brackets [ ].

Finally, while there is some occasional indication of paragraphing and indentation in the narrative, there are pages and pages without paragraph breaks. Where the text seems to permit it, I have separated segments for the sake of readability. Although there are no chapters in Mitchell’s document, I have inserted them where it seemed appropriate to do so. Only in one place does the narrative seem to have a chapter title, which I have included here.

Since I had promised Teryl and her father that I would never publish the document without their consent, I began to try locating the Mitchell family. Finally tracking them down, I learned that Teryl had died from a wasting disease on January 15, 2007, exactly one year to the day previous to my re-discovery of the document. Her father, Arthur, had died in August of 2002. Teryl’s mother, Josephine, was still living in her 9th ward home, just two miles from the levee break that wrought so much havoc in that part of New Orleans. Her home, built by Arthur himself, had been ravaged by the flood, but remained standing, even though almost everything else in the neighborhood was destroyed down to the foundations. The entire contents of the house, including Mitchell’s hand-written narratives, had been carried away by the storm surge. I had in my possession the only copy of his irreplaceable stories. I knew then that it was time to bring them to light, preserving them not only for Arthur Mitchell and his family, but for all of us.

I am profoundly grateful that these papers were not lost from my possession, despite extensive damage to both the retirement home I had bought on the Mississippi Coast on August 1, 2005, and the New Orleans home I was trying to sell at the time of the storm. I am also profoundly grateful for the gracious and loving hospitality of Josephine Mitchell, Arthur’s widow, who is a story all her own.

Gayle Nolan

January 15, 2012

Chapter 1

The man whose name this story bears was named at birth Henry Goody Jons after his slave owner’s father, the grandson of a French